


try your best in your heavy shape

by defcontwo



Category: Robin (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-06
Updated: 2014-08-06
Packaged: 2018-02-11 23:42:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2087475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s an adrenaline rush, sure, but it’s more than that -- there’s a common thread running through all of them, some space inside of them that was always searching for answers to questions that they didn’t even know how to voice and Robin, Robin was the answer, every single time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	try your best in your heavy shape

**Author's Note:**

  * For [protagonistically (the_protagonist)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_protagonist/gifts).



In the end, what really chafes at him about all this is the way his father looks at him. His father looks at him like Tim is something fragile and broken - something that’s lost its way that he needs to herd in and take control of, as if Tim doesn’t know any better. 

As if Tim can’t be trusted with his own safety, as if he made it all the way to seventeen years old as so much weak skin and bones and carelessness, unable to take care of himself. 

If there’s one thing that Tim can do, it’s exactly that. 

. 

The bright, midday sun filters into the classroom, warming the whole room until it’s hot, too hot, and you can trace the trajectory of the class’s attention span from almost here to not quite to half asleep. Not for the first time, he thinks this must be on purpose, a practiced trick to keep them docile in the last class of the day. 

His twirls his pencil idly back and forth between his fingers, flip, flip, flip, like he would a Batarang or a knife. 

Pencils can stab through skin if you try hard enough, if you know how to do it. Just combine the right amount of pressure with the right speed and it’s almost as good as a Batarang. This one’s yellow and plain, your regular old number two pencil picked up from the third floor bathroom floor because he never remembers to buy school supplies and anyways, it was just sitting there. 

Bernard sits at the front of the class, head up, picking apart the World War I allegories from a passage of T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land. _I think we are in a rat’s alley where the dead man lost their bones_ , Bernard says, and Tim has spent so many nights in so many alleys just like that that he’s lost count. It doesn’t help him get the poem any better, though. 

Tim watches the long line of Bernard’s throat as he speaks, hands gesturing wildly, and Tim thinks not for the first time about kissing him, about pushing the other boy into the lockers or against a wall and finally shutting up that smart mouth. 

Tim twirls the pencil, again, and loses himself in the fantasy of it before shaking his head, firmly, banishing it like so many cobwebs. 

Dating civilians never works out so hot for him. 

The pencil is halfway to making another neat, swift arc through the air when it hits him, sharp and swift, that he’s a civilian now too. 

The pencil clatters to the ground. 

At the front of the class, Bernard is still talking and Tim, well -- Tim still kind of wants to kiss him but he already knows that he won’t. 

He doesn’t date civilians. 

. 

Some days, he wonders. Sits down and really wonders what drove him to do it. 

Bruce was afraid, sometimes, that it was just teenaged kicks, an adrenaline rush and a game to chase down. Tim could see it all over his face, some nights, could read the _don’t be like Jason_ that might as well have been scrawled all over Bruce’s face with bright red marker. 

But Bruce has never really gotten what drives them to it, not really. It’s not as simple as grief, as finding a lack inside of yourself and trying to stuff something else inside of it to make you whole. Bruce is too far away now from his teenaged years to remember what it’s like to feel too big for the skin that holds you, pent up and fit to burst with a need to do more, be more, do better. 

There’s an adrenaline rush, sure, but it’s more than that -- there’s a common thread running through all of them, some space inside of them that was always searching for answers to questions that they didn’t even know how to voice and Robin, Robin was the answer, every single time. 

Bruce is afraid that Stephanie won’t take the job seriously. 

But she’s just like the rest of them, this Tim knows and here is the thread, the common denominator that ties them all together, alive or dead or otherwise: they took it too seriously, every last one of them, himself included. 

. 

He is halfway out of the school when a hand reaches out and grabs him, pulling him into a supply closet, and he’d twist around to fight it but he knows that hand, knows the way it looks when its fingers are laced through his, knows the way it looks when it makes a fist and knows it, now, covered in scrapes and newly cleaned blood. 

They are falling apart, maybe, or falling together at the same time at breakneck speed, he’s not sure which just yet but with Steph beaming up at him, the shadow of a bruise on her jaw and scrapes on her knuckles, Tim thinks maybe it doesn’t matter. 

This is what they are to each other: bruised and bloodied and laughing into the next kiss, regardless, and it will keep on working until it doesn’t. The part where it doesn’t, the part that comes after this, after TimandSteph separates into Tim and Steph -- it’s coming soon but he doesn’t want to meet it just yet so he smiles, a small tiny quirk of a smile, and bumps his forehead lightly against hers. “What’s shaking, Robin.” 

“I’ve got my uniform on under this outfit and it keeps riding up, how the fuck did you ever do this,” Steph whines, but her cheeks are dimpling and the annoyance is mostly bullshit. 

“Years of practice, padawan,” Tim says, tight and prim and feels the thrill of victory when he gets the huff and the eyeroll that he was asking for. “How’d it go?” 

Steph lifts a shoulder in a small, half-shrug. “Alright, I guess,” she says, as if she’s trying to be cool about it but it’s like her whole body is shaking with it and her eyes are bright and focused and Steph, Steph’s always understood the life, what it does to them, how good it can feel but there’s understanding it and then there’s understanding it as _Robin_ and he’d be jealous if it wasn’t such a good look on her. 

“Now, are you gonna kiss me or not, Timmy?” Steph says, grinning up at him, and so he kisses her and kisses her and kisses her until they’re both dizzy with it and he misses the last bus home and neither of them can find it in them to care. 

. 

Tim walks home at a steady, rapid pace. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched in but eyes wide open, scoping out every possible threat. 

Old habits are hard to break, who knew? 

He shoulders open the front door to his house to find Dana and his father at the kitchen table, poring over a take-out menu. 

“How was your day?” Dad asks, gaze steady and assessing and just this side of accusatory and that’d be another thing to get mad over but it’s not like Tim can blame him, exactly, for being worried. 

There’s a hickey poking out from beneath the collar of Tim’s t-shirt, pale skin bruising easily, but the scars that crisscross his abdomen, the healed up bullet wounds -- those are covered, still, and this transgression is a simple one and easily forgiven. 

“Same old,” Tim says. “What are we having, Chinese?” 

. 

Tim doesn’t sleep any better, these nights. He’s got several years worth of a sleep deficit but there in his suddenly too-comfortable bed, sleep is the furthest thing from his mind. He lies awake, eyes wide and unblinking, staring holes into the ceiling. His mind conjures up scenarios, always turning, never resting. Tim closes his eyes and he sees a murder in the Bowery. A jewel heist in the Diamond District. Cass, stopping thugs in an alleyway. Robin, always Robin, flying high above it all. 

A car backfires two streets over and he could’ve sworn it was a gunshot as he sits up in bed, fingers scrabbling for a weapon that’s not there. 

Tim falls asleep, finally, just as the sky starts to turn into a soft, dusky purple and he dreams in red, green and yellow.


End file.
